Many years have now passed since the Second World War, which left such a trail of havoc and horror all over Europe, and traumatically influenced the whole of modern history ― and since the Sho’ah, the Holocaust, with its brutal smashing of millions of innocent Jewish lives and the wanton destruction of great and peaceful Jewish communities whose only wish was to live unmolested in the way that their conscience dictated.

We regularly hear from those who would deny it all happened, or prefer to relativise its significance, as well as from decent and fair-minded people who somewhat impatiently ask, “Surely this Holocaust occurred a long time ago; why can’t you Jews forgive and forget, and free yourselves from your obsession with it all?”

The answer is that the experience has left such a permanent mark on the Jewish psyche, such a searing pain in the Jewish soul, that to suggest that it be erased is to ask the impossible, the unthinkable.

Never has there been such a catastrophe, such a deliberate, cold-blooded campaign to eradicate every single member of an entire people, the healthy and the sick, the old and the young, without exception, escape, exoneration, immunity, compassion, appeal, or redress.

Countless families are still inconsolably grief-stricken and bereft. Many of the survivors still suffer the nightmares; often the pain is getting worse, not better.

Even those fortunate enough to be less personally involved continue to be outraged at the jungle-like ferocity that brought to a sudden end over a thousand years of proud, dignified Jewish history and culture on the continent of Europe, wiping scholars, sages and saints, and great centres of piety and learning, off the face of the earth.

As Abba Eban writes in My People: The Story of the Jews:

Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated for many generations by the traumatic memories of the Holocaust. No people in history has undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality; a residual mistrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall; a mystic belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews grown up under its shadow.

I readily admit to having an obsession with the Holocaust. And that obsession ― someone inelegantly called it “Holocaustomania” ― has hold of Jews everywhere and will not let them go.

But the Holocaust is not just a Jewish concern. Its dimensions are universal. The Very Rev. James Parks Morton, one-time Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, said, “Auschwitz was the single most important event of the twentieth century, a paradigm of the advanced, intellectual, industrial, technological society gone to hell.”

Never was there such a confrontation between two diametrically opposed world views; as Jacob Talmon expresses it:

between morality and paganism; between the sanctity of life and the cult of warfare; between the quality of all men and the supremacy of the selected few; between the search for truth and the discharge of instinctive impulses; between the vision of a genuine society of equals and the prospect of a society of masters lording it over slaves.

A reviewer of Walter Laqueur’s book, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” poses this question:

From where, if not from the Holocaust, a premonition of the death rattle of the thermonuclear age, can come the testimony and the warning that man is capable of the worst as he is capable of the best, that through madness or blindness, he may transform the planet into a crematorium?

The Holocaust starkly confronts our generation with the paradigm of what can happen if man does not see in his fellow the face of a brother man; if, instead of using the new means of communication as media for dialogue, man blatantly or subliminally peddles lies and distorts the truth; if man prefers to see the whole world destroyed rather than rejoice to see other people peacefully inhabit their own little corner in the sun.

The Holocaust is not just one more chapter of Jewish suffering: it is a message to the world. In a world in which Jews can be ground down by the jackboots of inhumanity, no-one is safe anywhere. In a world in which the glass of the synagogues can be wantonly shattered, nobody’s sanctuary or identity or ideology is safe anymore.

That is why people everywhere should develop an obsession with the Holocaust if they value their future. That is why there should be not less “Holocaustomania,” but more.

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